Why Was X Never Finished?
Because the real world kept arriving at the same disasters the manga was drawing, and CLAMP refused to draw a different ending.
It is the first thing anyone asks about X, and the internet has filled the silence with a feud that the participants themselves deny. The documented answer is stranger and sadder. X is a manga about earthquakes heralding the end of the world, drawn in a country that then lived through the disasters on its pages, and its creators chose to stop rather than soften the ending they had planned.
The fullest account is CLAMP's own, given to PUFF magazine in July 2004 and reported in English by ComiPress in 2006. What follows stays close to that record, and labels the common rumors as rumors.
THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
From CLAMP’s own interviewsJanuary 1995: the Hanshin earthquake
The Great Hanshin earthquake struck Kobe on 17 January 1995, killing more than six thousand people. X had made earthquakes the drumbeat of its apocalypse. CLAMP debated with their editors whether the motif could continue at all; readers wrote in, and the series was pulled from Monthly Asuka for a time.
1997: the Kobe child murders
After the Sakakibara case, the murder of eleven-year-old Jun Hase in Kobe in 1997, attention turned to X’s graphic violence, and the series was pulled again. Igarashi, in the PUFF interview, named these two events as the largest factors in the series’ repeated halts.
March 2003: the stop
Serialization ceased after Monthly Asuka’s editors indicated Kadokawa was unlikely to publish the planned ending in a magazine. Ohkawa’s words in 2004: due to the graphic nature of the planned ending, getting it published in a magazine is very difficult. CLAMP declined to revise the ending, and the series went on hiatus a few chapters from its close.
The editors, on the record
CLAMP stated in the same interview that the rumor of friction with the editorial department is not true: the editors showed patience and, in CLAMP’s account, had not given up on publishing X. In March 2005 the group said they were searching for a proper magazine to finish it.
THE RUMORS, LABELED
What fandom says, and what supports itRumor: they fell out with Asuka
Repeated for twenty years, and denied by CLAMP themselves in 2004. Treat it as fandom folklore, not history.
Rumor: they never had an ending
Columnist John Oppliger argued that the group may not have a clear ending in mind. That is one critic’s inference, presented as such; CLAMP’s own statements describe a planned ending that was too graphic for its venue.
Reading: 1999 has passed
Analysts have noted that the story’s promised year is now decades gone, which complicates any return. This is commentary about the hiatus, not a stated reason for it.